I read a very interesting article this week —— 《How low (power) can you go》. The author proposed a very interesting prediction of the future world could be based on the physical law: Moore’s Law and Koomey’s Law.
Moore’s law is :
“Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit,[2] and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade.[3] In 1975,[4] looking forward to the next decade,[5] he revised the forecast to doubling every two years.[6][7][8] The period is often quoted as 18 months because of Intel executive David House, who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and the transistors being faster).[9]”
But the author said Moore’s law will expire very soon. Since we have a limit of the smallest size of atoms so the digital device can’t get more smaller than that.
Koomey’s law is:
“Koomey’s law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. The number of computations per joule of energy dissipated has been doubling approximately every 1.57 years. This trend has been remarkably stable since the 1950s (R2 of over 98%) and has actually been somewhat faster than Moore’s law. Jonathan Koomey articulated the trend as follows: “at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half.”[1]”
Basically Koomey’s law is decribing a more and more efficient ability the hardware to compute.
Like what the author said in the article: “ By 2022 we can expect our smartphones (or equivalents) to be as powerful as today’s leading edge desktop workstations”;
So based on the analysis and prediction of the more and more advanced, fast development of technology and internet, the future can be a city embedded with millions of sensors.
“So the most probable outcome I can see is that we will be entering an era of small, ultra-low-power wireless devices.”
The author predicted:“Let’s assume we have found a use for our billion cpu city, and we’re running a billion operations per second on each cpu. If each operation generates one byte of useful output — from air quality sensors, or cameras, or whatever — then our city is producing 1018 bytes of data per second. That’s heavy data: that’s 2000 grams per second. We’re really going to have to get our data de-duplication strategies under control, lest we build up memory diamond landfill at a rate of seven tons per hour! Luckily most computer programs don’t generate anything like one byte of output per operation — that’s a ridiculous edge condition. Given the bandwidth and power constraints on our tiny solar powered processors, I’d be surprised if they averaged even a megabit per second of output — and even that would correspond to uncompressed high-definition video from every square metre of our city. So let’s arbitrarily hack six orders of magnitude off that peak data output figure. Our city of 2032 is emitting as much information in a second as Google processes in an hour today: remarkable, but not outrageous in context.”
Actually it’s kind of creepy to have the sensors all over the city.
But as a designer maybe we can design something that against this kind of surveillance. For example: design a room which can interdict the signal of the internet and in that way we can avoid to be monitored.
Even though maybe the powerful ubiquitous processors could benefit us in someways, like the author proposed in the article : Climatology and meteorology, Local monitoring, Traffic control, but I still hold the opinion that these processors is kind of making us lack of freedom and in some ways invade our own privacy which we have the right to protect.
